The Talk Show With John Gruber · Daring Fireball / John Gruber

443: ‘The Pogue Feature’, With David Pogue

March 18, 2026·1 hr 26 min·5 clips

The screenshot button on every iPhone and Android phone exists because David Pogue asked Apple for screenshots of the original 2007 iPhone—and Steve Jobs refused so many times that Apple eventually just built the feature.

1. John Gruber, host of The Talk Show and founder of Daring Fireball, interviews David Pogue about his book 'Apple: The First 50 Years,' released in March 2026 and described as a 600-page full-color encyclopedia of Apple's history. 2. David Pogue is the author of the Missing Manual book series, a former Macworld columnist for 13 years, former New York Times technology columnist for 13 years, and one of four journalists who received the original iPhone for review in 2007. 3. The book's central approach is to cover products and the unsung engineers and designers who created them, rather than the boardroom and financial history covered by most Apple books. 4. Apple granted Pogue unprecedented access: four trips to Apple Park over 2025, back-to-back interviews with the entire Tim Cook executive team, engineers, designers, camera technicians, and sensor specialists, plus access to Apple's internal archive which yielded 700 previously unpublished images. 5. The book's genesis was Pogue's wife Nikki waking him up to suggest he abandon another Simon & Schuster project and write an Apple 50th anniversary book—which she insisted was two years away, and was right. 6. Pogue spent six months negotiating access, losing sleep over the problem that the Tim Cook era is effectively sealed because everyone who was there is still employed under NDA, ultimately winning cooperation by submitting a sample chapter and arguing the book was about products and unsung creators. 7. Tim Cook told Pogue in a TV interview that Apple's motto is 'we don't look back, we look forward,' but acknowledged that the 50th required commemorating the people who built the company—describing celebration as 'a new muscle for us.' 8. Jon Rubinstein, who originated the 'new product every year' cadence for the iPod because he believed Sony was months away from a competing player, told Pogue there was never a beer bash even when the iPod mini sold hundreds of millions—because the next morning the team was already working on the next product. 9. Rubinstein's Sony fear proved unfounded: Sony's first competing MP3 player, released years later, could not play MP3 files and only played Sony's proprietary format. 10. Pogue recounts the Apple III overheating story: Jobs refused to allow a cooling fan, the machine ran at 220 degrees, chips expanded and daughter boards came loose, and Apple's officially distributed fix was to have customers lift the machine 2-3 inches and drop it—a detail Pogue almost dismissed as myth until the original Apple III designer confirmed it. 11. The conversation contrasts the Apple III repair notice with the iPhone 4 'you're holding it wrong' antenna controversy, noting both represent Apple officially acknowledging a flaw through an unusual workaround. 12. Pogue identifies Chris Espinosa as the only person to have worked at Apple continuously for all 50 years, having joined at age 14 with his mother driving him to Homebrew Computer Club meetings; Espinosa's phone and cubicle are reportedly flooded with attention during the 50th anniversary. 13. Pogue reveals that four of the 150 people he interviewed have since died or become unable to speak, including Bill Atkinson in what turned out to be his last interview—reinforcing why the 50th anniversary is the last moment such a history could be assembled. 14. The conversation assesses Steve Jobs' two Apple eras: Steve 1.0 (Apple III, Lisa, early Macintosh, NeXT) produced no genuinely successful products, while Steve 2.0 (iMac, iPod, iTunes, iPhone, iPad) produced an almost unbroken string of hits. 15. Gruber and Pogue speculate that Jobs was transformed by the combination of age, the humility of forced exile, and NeXT's failure to gain traction—returning with better judgment about when to fight conventional wisdom. 16. Pogue describes Jobs' pattern of appearing to be wrong (killing the iPod mini at peak sales for the Nano, which held fewer songs but used flash storage) but ultimately being right—attributing it to 'the force' of reading technology inflection points before anyone else. 17. Jobs was dead wrong about the Spotify model: he argued that paying monthly for music meant you'd lose everything if you stopped, but Pogue notes that subscription streaming is exactly what users wanted, and his own college-age son doesn't understand the concept of owning music. 18. The episode is a flowing, well-informed technical conversation between two journalists who have covered Apple for decades, full of insider stories and mutual corrections of Apple mythology. 19. Apple enthusiasts, technology historians, and people who have used iPhones or iPods will find this conversation densely packed with surprising origin stories and revisionist history. 20. Listeners looking for a quick overview of Apple's history will find the episode too deep in specific detail; it is better suited to already-engaged Apple followers.

As heard by us

A focused Apple-history conversation with David Pogue, strongest on how his Apple-at-50 book came together.

John Gruber's conversation with David Pogue is a tight Apple-history stop built around Pogue's new book, Apple, The First 50 Years. The strongest stretch is the making-of: Pogue's Mac 40th anniversary event at the Computer History Museum, his wife's role in sparking the…

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Gruber caught David Pogue right off a plane to talk about the only Apple-at-50 book anyone wrote.

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